Michelle Azar calls playing the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in a one-woman show "an incredibly thorough, exciting, dynamic, ever-evolving miracle that has come into my life."

During the almost two years that Azar has been traveling from on theater to another in All Things Equal: The Life and Trials of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, she says her understanding of Ginsburg has grown. "It's very rare for an actor, the amount of information that I can still glean about this human."

The play written by Tony Award ® -winning playwright Rupert Holmes (The Mystery of Edwin Drood), is set in Ginsburg's chambers. The play opens and ends with her at age 87. In the first scene she welcomes a friend and in the 90 minutes that follow her dry wit is occasionally in evidence as she talks about her trials and triumphs.. Among them: the loss of her mother as she was graduating high school, being one of the few women at Harvard law, fighting for women's rights in the 1970s before being named to the Supreme Court in 1993.

The play opened in a 200-seat theater in Florida, she says.  "There were times when people would walk out. It was usually around the discussion of abortion. And then we went to the Hamptons. That was a very, very liberal, retired-early-from-the-law audience. They would stay afterwards and really want to talk about further things. Why she chose to stay on the court as long as she did and some of her policies."

And Holmes and director Laley Lippard, went back to the drawing board after hearing what the audiences were talking about, Azar says.

"So there was a big rewrite when we opened again that next January. And in that rewrite we kind of sorted through a little bit more of the nuances behind why RBG stayed on the court. The dignity that she was hoping to maintain."

Azar is quick to say they never presume to say that Ginsburg might have decided differently about staying on the court, but given the present deep divisions in the country now, they do intimate that perhaps she would have retired earlier. Doing so would have given a Democratic president a chance to nominate her successor with the Senate voting to confirm.

She says Ginsburg fought for equal rights for men and women in society. In a landmark case she represented Charles Moritz, who was caring for his elderly mother. Because he was an unmarried man, he was told he didn't qualify for a caregiving tax deduction. Ginsburg won that case.

In another landmark case Ginsburg reversed the policy of the Social Security Administration which gave women access to their husband's benefits but didn't give husband's access to their wives'. It was based on the assumption that men always made more than women. In that case she helped a widower access his wife's social security benefits.

"There's a moment when I really look to our audiences and I say 'Sorry, I understand you're angry with me.'"

Three years ago, Azur's agent Alison Caiola had seen the proposal for the project and thought it would be perfect for Azar, who initially didn't see it at all.

Azar grew up in Chicago doing a lot of musical theater especially as a child. She went to NYU and focused on acting. She played Janis Joplin in Beehive. Moved to Los Angeles and got episodic work on TV shows. But, she says, she never really left the stage. She created a theater company in LA  and wrote her own solo show From Baghdad to Brooklyn so carrying a show by herself wasn't a new experience with it came to Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Asked why people should come see the show, Azar says. "To engage with someone that they might not see right now in the political climate. To engage with someone who cares from an education point of view. Ruth always felt she was a teacher. And she has a compassion  to hear the other side of things, to hear all sides of things.

"I think people will come because it's frightening out there right now. It's frightening the polarity of things. I think what Ruth was able to do was promote and hold a collegiality amongst differences. It was very famously talked about her relationship with Justice Antonin Scalia who could not have been more different than she. So conservative. And yet because of that difference so many wonderful things were born. She said he continually helped her write her majority opinion by offering her his dissents. Such transparency.

"She listened, when she was wrong she said so. When she didn't know she said 'Let me get back to you.'

Performances are scheduled for September 5 and 6 at 7:30 p.m. at the Hobby Center, 800 Bagby. For more information, call713-315-2525 or visit thehobbycenter.org. $49-$110.